almost everybody should be good at it and some people should excel. Even at university, if most the group fails an item in a test, the item is removed from the test.
If this is the standard we hold games to, then nearly every game that's not released by Popcap is a failure. Certainly every other blizzard game is a massive failure if judged by that standard. Shouldn't we rather be looking at whether or not most people are having fun with the game? Being good at a game is not a necessary part of having fun with it (look at magicka for instance). I'm sure people in bronze league still have fun with sc2, even though they're absolutely terrible. The same can be said for most people playing WoW.
I can see that. I think a good game is pretty fun for ~95% of its players, and hard to master for ~90% of them. I think some of the predictions on these forums that only 1% of people will make it through inferno is a serious miscalculation. If that were even close to true I'd say the game was too hard. But on the other hand, if 100% of everyone who plays it is a master at it it's obviously balanced too far in the other direction.
I think our best conclusion at this point is to take Blizzard at their word:
Everyone, even new-to-RPGers will find Normal only moderately challenging. The real challenge starts at nightmare, where it gets ramped up considerably. Hell will then be yet another new horizon of hardness, and Inferno will challenge even the best. Obviously people who put a lot of time into video games and/or have considerable experience with this genre in particular or are part of a good group will probably have less trouble than those who aren't and don't. If all of that happens, then I'll say it's a pretty well made and balanced game as far as difficulty and learning curve.
almost everybody should be good at it and some people should excel. Even at university, if most the group fails an item in a test, the item is removed from the test.
If this is the standard we hold games to, then nearly every game that's not released by Popcap is a failure. Certainly every other blizzard game is a massive failure if judged by that standard. Shouldn't we rather be looking at whether or not most people are having fun with the game? Being good at a game is not a necessary part of having fun with it (look at magicka for instance). I'm sure people in bronze league still have fun with sc2, even though they're absolutely terrible. The same can be said for most people playing WoW.
I can see that. I think a good game is pretty fun for ~95% of its players, and hard to master for ~90% of them. I think some of the predictions on these forums that only 1% of people will make it through inferno is a serious miscalculation. If that were even close to true I'd say the game was too hard. But on the other hand, if 100% of everyone who plays it is a master at it it's obviously balanced too far in the other direction.
I think our best conclusion at this point is to take Blizzard at their word:
Everyone, even new-to-RPGers will find Normal only moderately challenging. The real challenge starts at nightmare, where it gets ramped up considerably. Hell will then be yet another new horizon of hardness, and Inferno will challenge even the best. Obviously people who put a lot of time into video games and/or have considerable experience with this genre in particular or are part of a good group will probably have less trouble than those who aren't and don't. If all of that happens, then I'll say it's a pretty well made and balanced game as far as difficulty and learning curve.
Of course this is the standard games are held to. A game must be easy to play and hard to master. Its a known psychological faq that you can't flow with a experience if you dont have a degree of competence in it.
Besides you argument about sc2 leagues is exactly what i mean. Bronze League players are good at the game (even if they suck by gold league standards); they have a basic understanding of the game and can play it competitively at some level. Gold league SC2 players excel at the game.
In D2 the moment most people hit nightmare and hell you suck if you did something wrong. You suddenly realize you are not pay the game right and you don't know how to do it. you need to go learn how to play it, check tables and spreadsheets, follow a class guide to reach a good build and have a chance to play at higher dificulties.
Sorry, but this is all kinds of wrong. Gold league players are incredibly bad.
Being "incredibly bad" requires some degree of putting special effort into being purposefully bad or something. That's not what Gold players are, you have to realize there's a LOT more players in Bronze/Silver, which makes Gold players pretty good. Gold players typically have decent macro and an understanding of build orders involved, and mostly they're busy building up macro, aka APM, which doesn't come from much except just plain playing.
You need to learn to use terms the way that actually makes sense. Saying everyone who's below Grandmaster is "incredibly bad" is just stupid and shows you have no understanding of simple statistics and where the Gold players are on the normal distribution.
I was responding to the general thread, and including a response to what you said as well, but thanks for making a poor attempt at flaming me to invalidate what I said.
Nevertheless,
Hell was hard. Sorry, but if you think it isn't then you've never played the game. Hell in 1.0 Classic wasn't that bad, but when they basically re-rolled the entire difficulty in 1.09~, etc by adding a ton of monster defense and Immunities, it became hard, period. If you're the kind of player that has only ever experienced it by getting rushed through the game and throwing on godly items then you have no real perspective on what I'm talking about, and if you aren't, but still insist that it's easy, then I'm fairly convinced you don't know what you're talking about in general. The fact is, that a normal character who hits hell in a timely manner and with non-godly-inherited items will have their asses handed to them by even the most normal of hell mobs. They hit hard. They're hard to hit as a melee character, etc. Sorry, that's just the way it is.
As to your insistence that the Diablo III skill system isn't any better: you've either not played both games, not played Diablo III at all, or are just a bad judge of game mechanics because even the most inexperienced of gamers should pretty quickly realize that Diablo III's is pretty superior is just about every conceivable way. That they are both "linear" is not the point, nor was it ever the point.
1. Diablo III has working resource systems that support their respective skill sets.
2. Diablo II requires you to invest 20 points, therefore levels, to make a skill viable. So a fifth of your character's time in the game revolves around one skill.
Sorry, but that's pretty clear cut. And the fact that you were required to make your way through other skills via permanent skill point allocation further reinforces that conclusion.
As to skill builds, I can see how they'll work based on beta play. Is it the whole picture? No. But have I seen any glaring issues like ones that persisted in Diablo II for literally years without being fixed? No. That tells me that logically, with as many choices as we have in skills in runes, there will be exponentially more viable builds in Diablo III than in Diablo II, yet another bullet point for why the skill system is superior.
Oh and btw, well-formed arguments =/= rambling just because they show you you're wrong.
As an SP player DII is generally difficult. Especially if, say, you do not use runewords (I used to not know runes do anything besides the bonuses on them, haha). If DIII is as difficult as DII I'll be pretty happy, as long as it's more balanced because DII was full of random difficulty spikes everywhere.
Edit: Equinox, saying gold league SC2 players "excel" is just as wrong as saying they are "incredibly bad" if you ask me
I never said they excel. Just saying they're not incredibly bad. There's always some low-life who manages to say that an NFL football player sucks because they are not terribly good among NFL players in general, but that's still an idiotic statement to make. (I suppose an NFL player would be equivalent to a grandmaster player, but I definitely heard SCII players put down various grandmaster players. It's pathetic)
implying that being in the middle of a curve means you're in the middle of the skill spectrum.
Gold players are above the curve (I know that's hard for you to believe), and, yes, statistical distribution does inform you of the relative skill level, and ladders work on relative skill level.
The differences between Masters players do not really matter. Masters are already in some tiny percentage of the entire playerbase. Nobody cares.
Also, gold players do not have "decent" macro, they have absolutely horrid macro. Neither do they have a good understanding of build orders or a good ability to execute them.
Can a gold player's macro be improved by anything besides playing time? Not really. Same goes for build orders.
Again, you're judging "good" against a standard of a master/grandmaster. I'm judging against normal people. Most normal people are far, far, far, far worse than Gold players. That's why calling Gold players incredibly bad makes no sense. Yeah, they're not professional StarCraft players, why would they be? I know a guy in Masters, he has 3k games per season. That's insane.
I wouldn't call it derailment because it's quite relevant to a lot of stuff discussed in this thread in regards to player skill and the like.
Under normal circumstances, professional players out of the picture. And they should be. Always. Especially in a game like Diablo. You're using professional SCII players to compare normal players to, and that leads you to call anyone who's not a professional player an "incredibly bad" player when that's not really reflective of their contribution.
And this goes into the thinking of Diablo and difficulty. There are very big perception differences between a normal player and a professional player (i.e., player with time). Often high-time players try to adjust the game to their enjoyment, but high-time players are a tiny segment of the population. They do not want to realize that or something and resort to calling everyone else "incredibly bad". Fuck your attitude.
Sorry, but this is all kinds of wrong. Gold league players are incredibly bad.
Of course this is the standard games are held to. A game must be easy to play and hard to master. Its a known psychological faq that you can't flow with a experience if you dont have a degree of competence in it.
A degree of competence is not the same as being good. A game being easy to play but hard to master does not equal a game where everyone is at least good. You'll have to make up your mind, because you're saying three different things here.
i hope you can answer one last extrapolating question about a player's ability, do you thing a minor league baseball player is a bad player?
Luedine, the skill system in D2 is so horribly bad compared to the skill system in D3, that they really cant be called "the same"
Both the skillsystems follow a linear progression, the difference is in the rate at which you acquire new skills.
I'll say it again, there will be cookiecutter builds that work better than others and most people will use those, expecting something else is just plain silly.
I was responding to the general thread, and including a response to what you said as well, but thanks for making a poor attempt at flaming me to invalidate what I said.
As far as I see it, I haven't flamed you one bit, I found most of your post to be a bucketload of rambling on about unrelated mumbojumbo. However you are going for quite a bunch of non-data, opinionbased adhominems in your very post in a fairly futile attempt to refute my points. In any way you are most welcome.
Hell was hard. Sorry, but if you think it isn't then you've never played the game. Hell in 1.0 Classic wasn't that bad, but when they basically re-rolled the entire difficulty in 1.09~, etc by adding a ton of monster defense and Immunities, it became hard, period.
Hell wasn't hard, You clearly think it was and hey, that is fine, you struggled with hell difficulty, I didn't. The only thing this means is that we experienced the mode diffierently.
If you're the kind of player that has only ever experienced it by getting rushed through the game and throwing on godly items then you have no real perspective on what I'm talking about, and if you aren't, but still insist that it's easy, then I'm fairly convinced you don't know what you're talking about in general. The fact is, that a normal character who hits hell in a timely manner and with non-godly-inherited items will have their asses handed to them by even the most normal of hell mobs. They hit hard. They're hard to hit as a melee character, etc. Sorry, that's just the way it is.
I've actually only been rushed through D2 once, through Act 3 normal. I've also had a couple of waypoints handed to me however that's it.
My most recent character, a lycandruid, ran through hell without ever coming close to dying, I believe I started hell on around 45 or 46.
Once again tho, you clearly have a different experience with hell than me, wether it is lack of optimization in your build, bad luck with drops on normal / NM or just plain bad strategy on your part I can't quite tell without this turning into a flamefest, but you're obviously doing something wrong if you find hell hard.
As to your insistence that the Diablo III skill system isn't any better: you've either not played both games, not played Diablo III at all, or are just a bad judge of game mechanics because even the most inexperienced of gamers should pretty quickly realize that Diablo III's is pretty superior is just about every conceivable way. That they are both "linear" is not the point, nor was it ever the point.
1. Diablo III has working resource systems that support their respective skill sets.
2. Diablo II requires you to invest 20 points, therefore levels, to make a skill viable. So a fifth of your character's time in the game revolves around one skill.
Sorry, but that's pretty clear cut. And the fact that you were required to make your way through other skills via permanent skill point allocation further reinforces that conclusion.
I don't find the skillsystem of D3 to be superior to that of D2, it is far more convenient to have access to all skills, yes. But it still remains the same, linear progression, you unlock skills as you go along and you still upgrade them. However instead of upgrading a skill by adding skillpoints to it, you upgrade it by adding a rune in D3.
As you stated above tho regarding me not having played either game brings up a tad confusion on my part here, you see: Your 2nd point here states that a 5th of your character is invested into maximizing a skill, now clearly anyone who has actually played D2 would know that is a huge pile of lies served on a plate of ad ridiculums.
I'll show you why tho:
98 skillpoints from levels
3 from Den of Evil
3 from Radamant
and 6 from Izual.
This translates into 110 skillpoints at 99.
As for the resource systems of D3, I'd say you could easily merge for example the wizard and witchdoctor into both using Mana and it would still work out just as fine, you just prefer each character having different resourcesystems. Once again that is just fine, but it doesn't make it better.
As to skill builds, I can see how they'll work based on beta play. Is it the whole picture? No. But have I seen any glaring issues like ones that persisted in Diablo II for literally years without being fixed? No. That tells me that logically, with as many choices as we have in skills in runes, there will be exponentially more viable builds in Diablo III than in Diablo II, yet another bullet point for why the skill system is superior.
I'm truly glad you haven't found any issues in the beta spanning over a year without being fixed.
Most of those issues you're mentioning didn't actually appear until years after D2s initial release however, we'll be able to look more closely into that particular concern once a couple of years has gone by.
You are correct however, there are a barrel of builds availible in D3 comparable to D2, however taking into consideration you have less base-skills to use, a rough 22~ compared to the 30~ in D2, it doesn't make much difference.
Yes, you'll have far more than 22 once you begin counting the runes, however take into consideration that the base for this rune might be flawed, then rather than shutting out 1 skill, you've shut out 7.
It is still going to offer more builds, but it does in no way mean that there will be a larger number of viable builds availible.
I agree with everything you just posted luedine. I love the people who are trying to compare a 12 year old Diablo 2 to a fresh Diablo 3. Compare vanilla D2 to vanilla D3. D2 wasn't "broken" or "cookie cuttered" or anything like they think it was in vanilla status. Diablo 3 will end the same way D2 did, all cookie cutter and a flowchart to everything.
In my view, the people bitching about Diablo 2 stat and skill points being removed are to be ignored. Most games have gone this route actually and until some renesaince in gaming "hardcorism" returns, this is what to expect.
Good riddance.
First of all no one is bitching about it, in fact the majority of discussion has been non inflammatory.
Secondly, just because it is a direction everyone else is moving in does not mean that it is for the best nor that Blizzard has to do it either.
I still have yet to read a single post or constructed argument against having an elective mode for stat allocation in D3. The uselessness of stats from d2 has been addressed in this game so that is a non issue.
All stats are useful so why can't I just pick what I want? I know there will be stats on items and grear but why does it have to be mutually exclusive?
I'm not whining or QQing and I will buy the game and, I'm sure, love it the way it is, I just would like to have manual attribute distribution.
This thread isn't "bitching about it" but when you to the Main Boards, that is all you hear. It is so bad that I barely post there anymore because of it.
D2 :
-Linear talent tree, you end up with 2 - 3 skills.
-Characteristics kind of useless, it's only used to gain more mana, health and be able to wear the best stuff.
D3 :
-A freaking LOT of different skills, with each different runes that can change the whole skill, you have to make a lot of choices, and still be able to use 6 different skills at a time, plus 3 passive skills, and you can still change it whenever you want, try another combination, try every skill to know exactly which is the best for you.
-Characteristics useful, you have to seek for more strenght, dexterity or willpower to be able to deal more damage, gain more evasion and elemental resistances, etc.
D3 is just way better than D2. You can't argue with that.
Easier to understand, but still way more complexe and complete.
By this logic, you and several thousand other people should cancel your order of Diablo 3 right now and just play Guild Wars 2.
You can't argue with that...
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Some people tell me I'm going to hell. I just let them know that I've already packed my bags!
I can see that. I think a good game is pretty fun for ~95% of its players, and hard to master for ~90% of them. I think some of the predictions on these forums that only 1% of people will make it through inferno is a serious miscalculation. If that were even close to true I'd say the game was too hard. But on the other hand, if 100% of everyone who plays it is a master at it it's obviously balanced too far in the other direction.
I think our best conclusion at this point is to take Blizzard at their word:
Everyone, even new-to-RPGers will find Normal only moderately challenging. The real challenge starts at nightmare, where it gets ramped up considerably. Hell will then be yet another new horizon of hardness, and Inferno will challenge even the best. Obviously people who put a lot of time into video games and/or have considerable experience with this genre in particular or are part of a good group will probably have less trouble than those who aren't and don't. If all of that happens, then I'll say it's a pretty well made and balanced game as far as difficulty and learning curve.
Of course this is the standard games are held to. A game must be easy to play and hard to master. Its a known psychological faq that you can't flow with a experience if you dont have a degree of competence in it.
Besides you argument about sc2 leagues is exactly what i mean. Bronze League players are good at the game (even if they suck by gold league standards); they have a basic understanding of the game and can play it competitively at some level. Gold league SC2 players excel at the game.
In D2 the moment most people hit nightmare and hell you suck if you did something wrong. You suddenly realize you are not pay the game right and you don't know how to do it. you need to go learn how to play it, check tables and spreadsheets, follow a class guide to reach a good build and have a chance to play at higher dificulties.
You need to learn to use terms the way that actually makes sense. Saying everyone who's below Grandmaster is "incredibly bad" is just stupid and shows you have no understanding of simple statistics and where the Gold players are on the normal distribution.
I was responding to the general thread, and including a response to what you said as well, but thanks for making a poor attempt at flaming me to invalidate what I said.
Nevertheless,
Hell was hard. Sorry, but if you think it isn't then you've never played the game. Hell in 1.0 Classic wasn't that bad, but when they basically re-rolled the entire difficulty in 1.09~, etc by adding a ton of monster defense and Immunities, it became hard, period. If you're the kind of player that has only ever experienced it by getting rushed through the game and throwing on godly items then you have no real perspective on what I'm talking about, and if you aren't, but still insist that it's easy, then I'm fairly convinced you don't know what you're talking about in general. The fact is, that a normal character who hits hell in a timely manner and with non-godly-inherited items will have their asses handed to them by even the most normal of hell mobs. They hit hard. They're hard to hit as a melee character, etc. Sorry, that's just the way it is.
As to your insistence that the Diablo III skill system isn't any better: you've either not played both games, not played Diablo III at all, or are just a bad judge of game mechanics because even the most inexperienced of gamers should pretty quickly realize that Diablo III's is pretty superior is just about every conceivable way. That they are both "linear" is not the point, nor was it ever the point.
1. Diablo III has working resource systems that support their respective skill sets.
2. Diablo II requires you to invest 20 points, therefore levels, to make a skill viable. So a fifth of your character's time in the game revolves around one skill.
Sorry, but that's pretty clear cut. And the fact that you were required to make your way through other skills via permanent skill point allocation further reinforces that conclusion.
As to skill builds, I can see how they'll work based on beta play. Is it the whole picture? No. But have I seen any glaring issues like ones that persisted in Diablo II for literally years without being fixed? No. That tells me that logically, with as many choices as we have in skills in runes, there will be exponentially more viable builds in Diablo III than in Diablo II, yet another bullet point for why the skill system is superior.
Oh and btw, well-formed arguments =/= rambling just because they show you you're wrong.
WTF formatting.
I never said they excel. Just saying they're not incredibly bad. There's always some low-life who manages to say that an NFL football player sucks because they are not terribly good among NFL players in general, but that's still an idiotic statement to make. (I suppose an NFL player would be equivalent to a grandmaster player, but I definitely heard SCII players put down various grandmaster players. It's pathetic)
Gold players are above the curve (I know that's hard for you to believe), and, yes, statistical distribution does inform you of the relative skill level, and ladders work on relative skill level.
The differences between Masters players do not really matter. Masters are already in some tiny percentage of the entire playerbase. Nobody cares.
Can a gold player's macro be improved by anything besides playing time? Not really. Same goes for build orders.
Again, you're judging "good" against a standard of a master/grandmaster. I'm judging against normal people. Most normal people are far, far, far, far worse than Gold players. That's why calling Gold players incredibly bad makes no sense. Yeah, they're not professional StarCraft players, why would they be? I know a guy in Masters, he has 3k games per season. That's insane.
I wouldn't call it derailment because it's quite relevant to a lot of stuff discussed in this thread in regards to player skill and the like.
Under normal circumstances, professional players out of the picture. And they should be. Always. Especially in a game like Diablo. You're using professional SCII players to compare normal players to, and that leads you to call anyone who's not a professional player an "incredibly bad" player when that's not really reflective of their contribution.
And this goes into the thinking of Diablo and difficulty. There are very big perception differences between a normal player and a professional player (i.e., player with time). Often high-time players try to adjust the game to their enjoyment, but high-time players are a tiny segment of the population. They do not want to realize that or something and resort to calling everyone else "incredibly bad". Fuck your attitude.
Diablo 3 trumps Diablo 2 in just about every way you nostalgic bastards.
i hope you can answer one last extrapolating question about a player's ability, do you thing a minor league baseball player is a bad player?
this is exactly my point, its a game, not work; I want it fun. The combat is suppose to be hard, character development should not be hard
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Curse PremiumThis thread isn't "bitching about it" but when you to the Main Boards, that is all you hear. It is so bad that I barely post there anymore because of it.
http://www.wowhq.com
Gear has no attribute requirements.
Str == Int for damage purposes.
They both increase your damage (depending on your class).
How you can so ignorantly say you can't "stat" to be a melee Wizard in D3?
Stack intelligence. Oh my gawd. Dat wus hardz.
By this logic, you and several thousand other people should cancel your order of Diablo 3 right now and just play Guild Wars 2.
You can't argue with that...